Edit Your Life – Elisabeth Sharp McKetta

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How does it feel when you read a book that's been well edited? What if you brought an editor's mindset to your life? Elizabeth Sharp McKetta knows the benefits of smart editing and shares what she's learned about applying those principles to how we live. Listen in - and learn how to edit your life.

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Bio

Elizabeth Sharp McKetta is a storyteller and the author of thirteen books across genres, including Edit Your Life and She Never Told Me About the Ocean. She has published many poems and delivered the TEDx talk “Edit your life like a poem.”

She has literature degrees from Harvard (B.A.), Georgetown (M.A.), and the University of Texas at Austin (Ph.D). She wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on the intersections between memoir and myth, a concept that informs her teaching and writing (and her entire way of looking at the world!) She teaches for the Harvard Extension School Writing Program, Oxford University’s Diploma in Creative Writing, and the Book Year Writer’s Circle.

Elisabeth grew up in Austin, Texas and lives with her family in Boise, Idaho; they travel widely. In her free time, she loves to make up stories her with young children  hike, read, make vegan soups, make new friends, and drink tea with old friends.

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For More on Elizabeth Sharp McKetta

Edit Your Life: A Handbook for Living with Intention in a Messy World

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Website

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Wise Quotes

On How to Edit Your Life

"So this idea of editing a book ends when the book is done, whereas of course, with a life, our lives are open books and it's never done until the life is over. So that principle of identifying in a life, what is this trying to be? And often with a life, I think it's an easy way to break it down is what gives me energy, what innately feels good. And then another side of that in both books and life that we'll probably circle back to is the question of what do I want to leave behind?...Where's the energy on a day-to-day basis? How do we lean toward that and away from things that take it away? And what are the things that we really want to look back on and feel like we've given so that they can outlast us? Those questions I think are really good editing questions. So when I think about editing a life, I think about the same editing questions we'll ask about a book, which are ultimately, what is this now? What is this trying to be? What works in its quest to try to be that and what is still needed to get it there? And I think those questions apply really nicely to lives."

On First Choices

"...When I think of first choices, my Mom has a term that I love called painless long shots. She always encouraged all of her children to, rather than thinking about all of the backup colleges apply to the first choice, the worst they will say is no, or whatever it is. Whether it's initiating a conversation with someone that we really want to be friends with, why not the worst that can happen as opposed to sort of scuffling around and thinking like, well,